Convergence
by Flatlander
Summary: A huge crossover of many game worlds and a few comics. Featuring characters from Chrono Trigger, Halo, Metroid, Tomb Raider, StarCraft, Splinter Cell, System Shock 2, Prince of Persia, and more! Expect more chapters coming up. R&R, please?
1. FicInit

This is one of my more ambitious projects. A fanfic, unifying around fifteen characters off about twelve of some of the best games of recent times.

I'll revert to my old style here. The newer one was found in my original fiction, Finding Time in also under the UserID Flatlander. I'm still not used to writing this way again so I hope you readers bear with it.

Hope you guys like the story. I'll be working on a chapter a day, I hope.

Oh, and Wesley DaSilva is not a game character. Don't go looking for him.


	2. 1 Insertion

It was raining hard at 10 pm. This time saw the arrival of a new character at the downtown London bar. He had on him a wide felt hat, a massive turncoat and freshly shined leather shoes. These attributes of his conspired to acquire the attention of most of the establishment's occupants, if even just for an infinitesimal moment of time, before their eyes were recovered by the television, whose display brought forth news that a great dragon had just been downed by Royal Air Force F-35s.

Wesley DaSilva was a detective for the NYPD, but out of interest he decided to visit the Other West, to the area where the anomalies were most densely concentrated. Yes, the "anomalies," or "God's Extended April Fools' Joke" as some rightist fucktard had called it. They began five years ago, March 23, 2009 – Hell Monday. You had your share of land-forming hurricanes that magically formed in about ten minutes, your slow-flying meteors, one of which nevertheless managed to bring down the whole fucking Empire State in one stroke, and then there were the more "anomalous" ones, like the dragon mentioned on TV. They'd all be preceded by the same blue flash of light, and a bit more activity far too quick to be registered fully by the human eye. Fast-exposure recordings of the flashes saw strange blue discs opening up, then whatever was to follow coming down, streaking iridescence as it, or they, fell. Then, of course, chaos.

All of this was interesting to all because it happened to _all_. No matter where you were in the globe – Canada, Australia, Russia, hell, the Aleutians – something will already have happened to you. And oddly enough, the occurrences only happened to populated areas. Dead places like the Sahara and Atacama were observed to be relatively safe zones. That tipped some off to go there. Or rather, that tipped _a lot off _to go there. In 2012 a migration of over a hundred thousand people off the most heavily filled cities moved to the center of the Atacama Desert. How that move was executed is still a logistical mystery, but the main problem lies in what happened afterward. About a month after everyone was settled down, a huge, horned cyborg creature with a frighteningly large missile launcher for an arm materialized among the prefab structures and proceeded to level the little town, all attempts to knock the bastard over defeated with ease. Everyone died – _everyone_, and the "Cyberdemon" was only destroyed later with a rapidly (and shoddily) assembled 32 megaton nuclear warhead. Seemed like there were no set places of damage, and it was presence of people that drew the wrath of God's Extended April Fools' Joke.

Anyway, back to DaSilva. After the Empire State Building incident, he left New York for London. The UK was being hit an average of two times a week, it was said, so the prospect of finding out what the hell was going on was much better over there. But in actuality there was also another reason for the UK as his choice. After all, Ukraine had problems at least once every other day, and everything from flying serpents to clones of Nessie were to be summarily discovered. Even France, quite nearby, was a better choice. But it was the presence of someone there who would probably understand these events better that brought him to the region.

The clamor all around him was deafening. Wesley DaSilva perceived the saturnalia as wild elephants on strychnine, and despite the apparent metaphorical quality to this absurd comparison, the affinity between the two factors was really quite close. Of course, this bizarre acoustic amplification was nothing more than a classic demonstration of alcoholic psychotropy, because DaSilva _was_ drinking, perhaps to an extent beyond that which creates illusory figments. He continued to inebriate herself at the bar with draught after contiguous draught, further warping his senses and deconstructing his reason to the point that he lost all ability to support himself and finally collapsed, lying slumped over the bar table.

Terrible headache. But it was better than what happened to some kid in school the day before. After all, over a hundred tons of dragon would smack _anyone _around pretty bad, wouldn't it?

It was 9 am. _Drinking again, obviously_, he thought. But after he lost his wife to a meteor, depression was no unusual thing to him. He'd drown himself in liquor to ease the pain. Bad choice sometimes.

It was time for him to get back to business. He knew no one else in this hellhole other than the woman he'd called a week before to schedule an interview. In these times of great peril and still complete incomprehensibility, there was that one woman who'd been through quite similar things before – so she said in her spots on TV, and many believed her adventures to be totally fabricated; but what drives a rich, pretty, and highly intelligent woman to get out the guns and fight off bad guys? To collect artifacts, even. And if all her life was bullshit, well, there isn't anyone else who can create stuff like what you'd see in her personal gallery.

DaSilva'd been there, of course. The woman was an old friend of his; he'd done her a good favor bailing her out with some incident over in the Great Wall of China. Rich girl, as mentioned. Damn good-looking, too. But it wasn't time to think of those things. Right now, Wesley DaSilva was going to pay a visit to the Countess of Abbingdon. You'd have to go a thousand miles from an asphalt road not to know her name. Lara Croft's a pretty famous person, isn't she?

A little odd how the whole point of him being in London was to get to the outskirts of London. He was picked up, as scheduled, by the limousine sitting near the Square. When he got to his destination, well, even if he'd been there somewhere close to a dozen times, the initial shock never seemed to go away.

Croft Mansion was big. 289 rooms over 17 sectors and a freaking hedge maze that could've had a mansion of its own. That was _big_. As in, _Spruce Goose _big, or _Burj Dubai _big. This was a clear example of someone trying to show the world how long his dick was, or with respect to a possible female builder, how wide (deep?) her cunt was.

The gates swung open before the limo was in any viewing range from them. The chauffeur stopped by the comparatively small front door of the palatial estate, and dropped DaSilva off there. He knocked thrice on the door. It was answered by Miss Croft herself, though through the speaker above the frame.

"Why, Mr. DaSilva," she expressed. "You're early. Rather unusual for you, I must say."

"Is that a problem?" DaSilva asked.

"Not at all. I'm actually quite pleased by this turn of events, seeing as I would've had nothing to do whatsoever until the designated time of your arrival. Do come in."

The door swung open. The interior of the house, vast and beautiful, sucked him in, and none of his steps into the house were voluntarily taken. Every square centimeter of floor area was covered in some rich carpeting. Tapestries of inconceivable worth were spread out among the walls. And floating just below the ceiling, holographically projected, were replicas of famous paintings, one of them being the image of Lady Croft herself.

Lara Croft entered the room looking quite blindingly resplendent. DaSilva could hear the deep voiceover now, as he'd in jest practiced, from all the B-movies, satires and spoofs about detectives. _The broad entered the room swiftly and quietly. As if she was simply gliding over the floor. She had long, brunette hair in braids, and wore a scarlet satin number that cut through the formality of the place like a newly tempered jackknife through butter. She spoke in a tone that saw her happy to see me, but I knew that there was something up. The dame knew that I knew too._

"Lady Croft," he said, kissing her hand in a rather awkward fashion. "Am I doing this right?"

She laughed. "It's Lara, you idiot." She pulled her hand away. "And no, it's not right. And I don't think you ever _will_ get it right, so stop trying."

"Right. Just trying to hit on royalty."

"Oh, shut up."

They moved to a pair of lounge chairs by a roaring fireplace. The grill in front cast flickering, radial black bars in the golden surf of the fire's light. Burning embers, so miniscule as to resemble gold dust, flew off the wooden logs, and disappeared in the blaze seconds after their flight. Between the two chairs, on a coffee table were a silver tray, two pitchers, and two glasses.

"Tea, Mr. DaSilva," she said and pointed at the first pitcher. "Or a good old Pepsi?" She motioned to the second.

"It's Wesley. And the Pepsi will do fine, thanks." She poured the black liquid into my glass. He drank it and immediately spat it out. "This is black tea."

"Oh my goodness," she quickly said. "I'm terribly sorry." But she was snickering a bit beneath her voice.

"Very funny, Lara."

"Just like old times. So, what brings you here to my modest little dwelling?"

"Who hasn't heard the news?"

"Certainly not me." She swept up a glove off the table and motioned to the ceiling. One of the projected screens glided in front of the two. It looked to be about seventy inches diagonally across. "Archive, news," she said. "Categorized under 'April Fools' Joke." The screen, previously fixed to an image of the Mona Lisa, shifted to a rapid play of thumbnails, miniaturized images and videos of all the anomalies that had occurred since Hell Monday.

"What are you thinking, Wesley?"

"I'm here to ask _you_ that, Lara."

"Why me? S'not as if I'd know any better than some random passersby on the street."

"You've been through similar stuff, haven't you? That T-Rex in China, the business with the big spider thing up in Antarctica…"

"Right, of course, _those _adventures. Well, they're done now, are they not? I don't have anything to do with this. I basically don't know shit."

"Well, you don't know anything at all?"

She sighed. "Persistent fellow, aren't you? That's a good sign. Come here."

They were in the ballroom. The place was filled. Not with dancers but with technicians and equipment. LIDAR plates, gamma arrays, and some stuff DaSilva couldn't even pronounce. There they saw Zip running towards Croft. Zip the computer expert. Zip the techie. Zip the geek.

"Jesus, Lara, you won't believe it-" He was panting.

"Easy now, Zip! This is Wesley DaSilva."

He shook DaSilva's hand. "Pleasure."

"Pleasure's all mine," DaSilva responded.

"You two have met before, I suspect," Croft spoke.

"Oh, yes of course. You helped out our dear girl with that incident in Nevada, didn't you?"

DaSilva nodded. "China as well."

"Right then," Croft interjected. "What were you saying when I came in, Zip?"

"You know that mild EMS outburst you told us to look for? The one that comes right before the flash? Well, we got our little fucker calibrated for the job, and it's been picking up signals from halfway across the globe! These outbursts stick out like a husky among Rots. I'm surprised SatComm or even SatellaView aren't seeing anything. Hell, I'm surprised Google Earth isn't predicting these bitches!"

"What do we do, Zip?"

"We just need to link up to the sats and then we'll be recording the locations. I've got a couple of favors up there in NORAD, and I'm thinking that some AWACS birds could be rigged to handle the machinery."

"So what's the average frequency?"

"It varies, but it looks like it's got a bias towards a very specific number. 2.453GHz."

"You mean microwave frequency?"

"Yeah."

"AWACS might have base microwave checkup support. All right, call in those favors, and tell me what you have when this whole damn operation is done. And try to get NASA on the line. I don't give a damn about lawsuits or NSA; hack into their lines if you have to."

DaSilva and Croft walked across the room. Computers were being set up and collector dishes were being hauled outside to be assembled. DaSilva spoke after a while. "You've been busy, I see."

"Yes. After most of the major observatories were blown up and we lost a lot of personnel, we decided to get out own equipment. I'm funding all of this, of course." She smiled.

"Amazing. But what about the possibility of this place getting blown up as well? It's the same safety issues as…well, pretty much _anywhere_."

"You forget, sir, that a nature-defying 100 percent of the time, these events only take place in heavily populated areas. Remember that little city in Canada? Very, very densely populated, and the place was hit over and over again. At least once a day, it's said, though not all incidents were recorded. After the one-week mass evacuation, the city was blank, almost empty save for a few nomads and squatters. And immediately, almost magically, nothing happened to that city anymore. We're pretty much away from all the trouble, and we always keep the number of persons per square kilometer at a low minimum. Of course, if all else fails, Croft Mansion has a subterranean network as well."

"You've pretty much thought of everything, haven't you, Lara?"

Croft had been talking quite enthusiastically until then, but now she was suddenly morose and reflective. She sighed. "No. People still die. I just try as hard as I can. We're here to minimize deaths, not prevent them. I'll have thought of everything when I've helped in stopping these fucking horrible things."

"You think they can be stopped?"

"I _hope_."

Zip's voice rang out in the room. "Lara! Check this out!"

"What's going on now?" came Croft's reply.

"We've got something off the east coast. It's got the trademark gammas but something else came out with a strange looking IR sig."

"Put it onscreen."

The holographic screen at the ballroom stage flashed to life. Looked like the silhouette of some kind of aircraft.

"They're transmitting radio too," said Zip. "We've got audio."

"What? What's in there?"

"Well, they speak English."


	3. 2 Chronotriggered

"Whoa!" Lucca screamed. "What was that?" She looked around her. Marle and Crono were still asleep in their seats, but they were beginning to stir. Beneath them was a surging sea and all around heavy rain pelted the canopy and fuselage. Obviously they were no longer in the time stream.

_Epoch_ seemed okay. The sturdy craft's sweeping wings were latched on by a military leader, after all, and not some blue Nu. Lucca ran diagnostics on the craft's systems, and it looked as though the fuel tank was badly hit. They'd be going down in about five minutes at their current output.

Speed: Mach 1.2. The momentum from the abrupt break in the chronometric particle coils was still around, and it was clearly unintended because normally the ship would slow down to only about 300kph.

Integrity field: 30 percent. That must have been a very bad shock to bring the field down to this level.

CPC status: **Offline**. That was a problem. Something probably knocked the coils off alignment. She'd have to fix that when…_if_ they land.

Visibility was low, and the autopilot did not recognize the terrain. She had to fly manually. The LIDAR rangefinder wasn't working properly either, so she fired out radar all over the place. The nearest landmass was 130 kilometers away on their current bearing, so it looked like they were going to make it. But just in case, she pulled out the radio transmitter she got off 1999AD right after the Day of Lavos was resolved, and called out a distress signal. _This is _Epoch_, research craft _(she used that excuse for all the advanced devices in the small craft)_, requesting assistance from any personnel in the area. We are unfamiliar with the terrain and cannot get our location. Advised you trace the radio signal to find us. We will be beaming for as long as we can. We're running low on fuel and are in danger of emptying our tank before hitting land. Please respond, anyone. We're on bearing…_

That was all. Now to get their butts back alive.

Marle woke up first. "Lucca! What just happened?"

"We were kicked off the time stream. I don't know by what, we were just pulled out. The coils are down, so is our fuel, and it's raining so hard I can't see thirty feet ahead!"

"What time period is this?"

"It says 2014 AD but the location is different. We're not home anymore. We're somewhere else."

"_What?_ I thought _Epoch_ only travels through time whenever we set the coils!"

"Time and space are a continuum. If you disrupt one you touch the other too. Normally we'd only be going to the exact same spot, only at a different point in time. But seeing as something just really messed with our movement through time, it's not surprising that we've been thrown off really badly through space as well."

"That makes sense, I guess. What do we do now?"

"We land. The ground's just…a hundred klicks away. We can make it."

She turned on terrain digitizing on the HUD, and through the thick precipitation a wireframe rendition of the terrain ahead was laid out on the transparent screen. _Epoch _was surprisingly quite maneuverable, among many other good things. That dolt Dalton, who had converted the Wings of Time into the Aero-Dalton Imperial, may actually have had some intelligence in him. The craft seemed to have been designed to take quite a beating from weather and hostile forces, with an adaptive ILS landing system, detailed and useful avionics, and an amazing arsenal of energy weapons. Or maybe he just had an army of techies and literal know-it-all designers at his disposal. Now _that _was a more likely explanation.

Their fuel was out, and the much-feared "flameout" occurred. "Flameout" is the aviation term used to describe the loss of the "pilot light" of an aircraft's engine – in other words, the deadly loss of all flame in the combustion chamber. This killed the engine, and it is difficult to restart it. Not that they could, with an empty fuel tank. They were gliding now and running on momentum, still a klick and a half offshore. But at 500kph, they were probably going to make it. They were riding the wind of the storm as well, so their slowdown wasn't as quick. Now they were faced with the problem of landing.

Crono had just woken up, so Lucca said, "Crono! Deploy the airbrakes and the sled! We're going way too fast to make an emergency landing." He opened his mouth to ask what the heck was going on, but knew the urgency of the matter and did as told.

Terrain mapping replaced the wireframe and the visuals were much clearer now. They saw a bright, well-lit city ahead, but the roads were far too narrow for them to land. There was an airport, just two klicks away, so they chose that location. Trouble was, they were about to run into rush hour for air traffic.

_shift_

"This is ATC to _Epoch_; we're having trouble supporting your request for an emergency landing. Are you absolutely sure it isn't possible for you to stay in the air for a bit longer?"

"This is _Epoch_. Confirmed. We've got zero-zero fuel in our stores and our speed's down to two-twenty. We'll paste ourselves on your runway if we try to make another round."

"Epoch, what's your ETA?"

"We've got about two minutes to crashdown."

"Do you have V/STOL support?"

"We would, if our fuel stores were here."

"There's a fuel dirigible floating over the airport. Climb to 2,500 ft and jack in your fuel pod."

"Can't comply, ATC. We have a nonstandard pipeline."

"Damn it…All right, _Epoch_, you've got about thirty secs after you get here to land safely before the next plane arrives. We're setting up illumination for your runway. Blue and red lights."

"Got that, ATC. Thanks for helping us out."

ATC Joe Micheli looked to the horizon for a small aircraft flying slowly towards his tower. Funny. The woman who radioed him had such a high voice. Like a kid. Well, he hoped that they'd get here safe.

_shift_

_Epoch_ crashed down on the runway hard. The starboard airfoil was ripped destructively off the fuselage. The canopy shattered from the impact on the ground. Some of the cockpit avionics displays broke and the landing sled crumpled under the pressure. To make matters worse, they were still skidding on the ground at 70kph when they hit, so some of the underside surfaces were destroyed. The internal weapons bay doors were cleft asunder by a side post and a missile dropped out. The warhead's explosive was highly volatile and the friction with the runway blew it up, further damaging the craft. It finally stopped nearing the end of the runway, with some of _Epoch _on fire and the three dazed occupants leaving the smashed up craft.

The firetrucks and ambulances that served as illumination came over to the wreck and extinguished the flames, and then parameds with stretchers came up to the three time travelers. One of them said, "You're just kids!" And they were. Two blonde females and a redheaded male. The three of them seemed far too muscular and tall to be so, but they looked to be only in their early teens – fifteen or so – and their voices said it too.

"Yeah," said one of the blondes, to be identified as Marle. "So?

"So? What do you mean 'so'?" He called over the supervisor and told him about the three passengers on the ill-fated craft. The supervisor passed his comments to airport security, and the three kids on stretchers were escorted to the terminal.

Crono, Lucca and Marle found themselves in a soundproof room with a one-way glass window to their side. In the room were two officials from AirSec.

"I'm Jacob, this is Angelo. Who are you kids?" one interrogator said.

"I'm Marle," said, naturally, Marle. "These are Lucca and Crono."

"Where are you from?"

"Guardia."

"Guardia? As in, _La _Guardia? LGA, New York? You kids are pretty far from home, especially in an apparently short-range craft like yours."

"No, just Guardia! I can't believe you mistook it for someth-" Marle received a nudge on the side from Lucca.

"Marle," she whispered. "We're not home anymore, remember?"

"Oh, right. I mean, yes, of course, _La _Guardia. New York."

"Where did you get this plane? It's like nothing we've ever seen. Quite advanced, too. Who was flying it?"

"Uh, err…This was our dad's plane, he designed it. He lets us fly it a lot-"

"Without a license to fly?" interrupted Angelo.

"Yes," Lucca said. "He knew that we were too young to fly, but he wanted us to get the experience. Even at the risk of getting caught, you know. By the way, I was flying it."

"Those were some pretty smooth moves up there. But the thing here is what got you in this situation in the first place. Did you know that our radar has a range of four hundred kilometers? Well, we first detected you only about a hundred kilometers offshore, and other, more distant planes close to your position were already being tracked. Our instrumentation was working fine and there wasn't much interference. And before you came in, our radar detected a huge object appearing for just a short moment, right where you were first seen. Can you explain that?" At that moment, Lucca saw a glint of gold beneath the man's black suit. The other AirSec guys who brought them in didn't have anything else besides their well-displayed AirSec badges. This was not a good thing.

"Well," Lucca said. "Can you explain that?"

Let me think," said Angelo. "You're not from around here, are you?"

"I don't think so."

"You're not from anywhere near _here_, are you?"

"I certainly don't think we're from this place."

"Right…you might have come from a big blue disc that just opened up in the sky, right?"

That got Lucca. "What?"

"Oh, don't bullshit me, girl. SatComm saw every moment of it. Your craft left some kinda portal."

"What? I honestly don't get what you're saying-"

"_Don't play with me, bitch!_" he screamed. "I lost my whole goddamn family to the things that come out of those fuckers! You came out of one of those portals. You may have something to do with it."

Marle butt in. "Look, whatever's happening to your world, we don't have anything to do with it. We didn't even know about this world!"

"So you admit you're 'not of this Earth', am I right?"

"Absolutely."

"Right…right…well, see this badge?" He pulled out the gold thing that Lucca had seen. "This reads 'NSA'. A little bird told me that his friends would be coming to pick you up. But not before we got to you. The three of you are to be detained for further questioning."

"What? But we-"

"Shut up!"

Then Jacob stood up, tapped a small device on Angelo's neck, and he was out cold. "Come on. We haven't much time. Our ride's outside."

"What's going-"

"I'm with the little bird's friends. We're here to help. Now we have to move _fast_."

They did not hesitate to follow this new character. Minutes later they were out of the building and running to a rather elongated vehicle, which moved out quickly when they got in – trailed by a truck hauling the remains of _Epoch_.

_shift_

The house was big. Maybe as big as Guardia Castle, maybe bigger. It was huge, that was the idea. Marle gazed with awe at the place. One family possessing enough wealth for a house as big as this? She couldn't believe it. Next to the Black Omen, the biggest structure she'd seen so far was Guardia Castle. Now she saw before her a structure equal even to that.

They were welcomed warmly inside the house. They were given warm chocolate, and blankets and a place next to the fire to warm them, for they'd just been through the coldest of rain. The three-hour drive hadn't left them any better.

A woman in a red dress, followed by a man in a wide coat, came in after a few minutes.

"Good evening," she said. "I send greetings to my extratemporal visitors today. I'm Lara Croft of this house, Croft Manor, and this is my friend, Wesley DaSilva."

"How do you do," extended Marle thoughtfully.


	4. 3 Cause and Effect

SPARTAN-117, fondly known by rank as Master Chief, didn't like the sight with which the hole in the wall provided him. As if those Covvie bastards weren't enough, whoever was God decided to bring in some other hostile forces in as well. Some of the new guys looked like Elites on a bad day; the others were as big as Hunters and did as much damage. In any case, the only redeeming quality of the newcomers was that they attacked _both _sides. They couldn't possibly have been with the Covenant, 'cause if they were, then those guys must've been having the worst problems with friendly fire anyone had ever seen.

The Chief cocked his battle rifle and armed himself with a plasma rifle in one hand and an SMG in the other. He'd never liked Covenant weapons, but they did the trick regardless. He jumped through the hole and rushed like hell to the nearest…tree.

Plasma fire and 7.62 tracers arced over the battlefield. Cairo Station was beat up pretty bad, and the human forces were suffering. Some of the surviving marines were holed up in armories away from the crossfire, while others joined in as snipers, taking down combatants from the Covenant and the unknown side. The new enemies were raining incredible hell upon the Covenant troops and seemed to be doing a better job than the humans at defending Earth. They'd appeared in nearly all the stations, some on Covenant and human ships, and some on Earth, even. Their ships exited a portal that appeared right in the middle of the battle, and they immediately started off for everything they could see. This quite instantly turned the tables on the invading Covenant. The strangers' weapons were about on par with those of the Covvies, but their numbers made it extremely difficult for them to pursue the battle with the humans. They focused their attention on them and almost forgot about the humans.

Of course, what _everyone_ forgot was that it wasn't just the big ships that appeared. Leaving one of them just as they entered the region was a small ship, and inside was a single passenger in a big power suit.

_shift_

Samus Aran rolled out of her damaged gunship right into the biggest firefight in Cairo Station. She jumped herself up a ramp and dropped on the second floor landing overlooking the battlefield. Undeploying her Morph Ball, she charged up the Long Beam and surveyed the battlefield.

On one side were the Zebesian Space Pirates. Typical armor, blades, weapons, nothing special. In fact, these were probably the same guys she was fighting just hours ago. They had similar caste colors, even.

On the other side, and holding up quite admirably, were unusual little aliens in weak-looking space suits and armed lightly. They were supported by skinny, shield-baring guys, with heavier weapons, and tall, heavily armed and energy-shielded beasts who looked a little like the SP's. There were too few of them, however, to keep the battle alive, and they were falling back slowly. Tug-of-war was being won by the numerical superiority of the SP's.

And out the window, just in front of her, was Earth.

_What the hell? _she thought. _That can't be right. _She looked around. Up the stairs, she scoped out the crevices on the far wall and the platforms above. There were humans up there, sniping members of both factions. Amazingly, very little fire was being directed at them-

Grenade. Blue, steaming plasma, coming from the fighting below. She grabbed it and tried to field it back, but the thing stuck to her like glue.

"Shit!" she cursed silently. The 'nade exploded and defeated the recharging experimental shields she received from the Galactic Federation. The display readout in her helmet told her that the shield wasn't charging up. Presumably the GF didn't think about what would happen when the user bearing the generator was blown up point-blank. She made a mental-note to submit that to the Feds when she was out of this strange mess.

She was blown off her feet and fell back down into the exchange. Getting back up she fired up the Ice Beam and strafed the offending SP's who recognized her. She was a much bigger threat than the now-declining force of the retreating unidentified aliens.

They turned to ice quickly and Samus saturated their stand with missiles, shattering them and putting an end to that particular threat. She then collapsed the gate behind her with another missile attack. The aliens ahead were advancing now, having received a wealth of reinforcements. Also, her roadblock wasn't going to last long, as deep, muffled explosions shook the debris, preceded by sounds like SP accelerators. She rolled herself up and transited to another room where, she hoped, there would be more agreeable conditions.

_shift_

The Chief was standing over Covenant corpses and the bodies of the aliens. Up ahead was a doorway blocked by debris and it sounded like the bad guys were trying very hard to come in. He looked around for remaining troops, and then saw an object moving very quickly down the hallway into another room. He followed the ball-like thing and turned a corner, to find a humanoid silhouette where the ball should've been. The thing had just finished off some Covenant troops and members of that new race. It turned to face the source of the heavy footsteps and immediately engaged the Master Chief. It fired some kind of beam weapon, devastating the Chief's shields just like the Sentinels he encountered back in the Library. The Chief rolled for cover while his defensives recharged, but nothing was happening. Could that thing have damaged the generator?

Next to him was a dead elite. Energy sword and plasma rifle. Which would he choose? He picked up the rifle and tested it. Nothing happened. Definitely the sword. He whirled it a bit, trying to get used to it, and then he dove out and lunged at his adversary. It sidestepped him and tried to shoot him in the back but he evaded the beam. He holstered the SMG and "sprayed and prayed" the last three bursts available to him from his battle rifle. Four rounds struck the enemy's chest plate and dazed it slightly. He took this miniscule window and swiped at its torso. The figure dodged the attack and then aimed as the Chief came back for a finishing blow.

They came at exactly the same time. The Chief held his sword to the "neck" of the suited-up character and his SMG to its head, and it raised its arm-mounted cannon to his visor plate.

"Your shields are down," observed the enemy. It had a female voice.

"So are yours," riposted the Chief. They were held in a pretty good stalemate, so the Chief decided to go for diplomacy. "What's your name?"

"Samus Aran. You?"

"Call me Chief. Well, Samus, it looks like we're fighting the same baddies here, so we've basically got two choices. We can either blow each others' heads off, or we can get these bastards and _then _resolve our differences later."

"Sounds fine with me. But how do I know you're not going to fuck me over when I put my gun down?"

The Chief responded by lowering both weapons. Risky move if she was hostile. He waited for her response. It was the only thing left to do. With his shields down and no ammo in that SMG he held up, he would've died anyway if he continued to fight. And there was no avoiding that; the ensuing onslaught came from all sides.

He waited, and then she lowered her gun. Samus spoke. "You from around here?"

"Yeah. I suspect you're not."

"Nope. So, lead the way, Chief."

"Right."

"Nice suit, by the way."

"Compliment the taxpayers. And same for you. Were you that ball I saw?"

"Yeah."

"Useful feature."

"It puts a good spin on things." Aran smiled a bit behind her visor.

The Chief ran out with Samus and towards the armories in the lower level.

"Are you sure we can trust her?" said a questioning girl's voice in the Chief's head. "You know how women go."

"No," said the Chief, with the silencer on. "I don't know how women go. And as far as the situation goes, it's she who should be asking herself if she can trust us."

"Right-oh. I'll inform the men you've got company."

_shift_

"Guardia, huh," said DaSilva.

"Biggest kingdom ever," chirped Marle.

"So that's your story," said Croft.

"Not all of it, of course," Lucca replied. "We left the parts out that wouldn't be useful."

"I see."

In full truth she left out almost the whole story after Lavos was destroyed. She began at the point where Crono's mom went into the Time Gate running after the kittens. They scoured as many time periods as they could, finally coming out at 1987 AD, where a newspaper read "Gina's back!" That caught their attention for a moment, seeing as that was her name. It was a loose lead, but the picture confirmed it all. The greatest rock star of the Twentieth Century was Crono's mom, and she'd just returned from a bout of lung cancer. She looked different, a little older, but there was no doubt that it was her. They checked each year before that, searching for a year where there was little to no mention of her, until they came to 1969 AD. There they found a woman living in the streets, wearing clothing appropriate for their time. She was amazed to see the three of them again, "after three long years of solitude, oh my goodness, thank heavens you're here!"

Three long years. That was a problem. They asked her if she remembered where the portal sent her, and then they left for that spot. Flying over it, they set the chronometrics to 1966AD and flew off, and then the problems began.

"You know," said Lucca. "The activity logs on _Epoch_ should be able to tell us what happened."

"I thought of that," replied Croft. I'm having your main computer hauled out right now."

A pair of bulky men entered the room and deposited on the floor a large sphere, mounted on a stand that fit the curves of the ball. Like an _egg-holder_, Lara observed.

Lucca removed the top of the sphere and fiddled with the workings inside. She retrieved a small chip with projected contacts. "This was designed to be compatible with any base-two binary system, and base-three support is limited but…well, it's there."

"We're on binary," said Croft. "So that shouldn't be a problem." She took the chip and, with her gloved hand, called down a receiver. "I still find it hard to believe that you speak our language and have _exactly _the same alphanumerical symbology as we do. It's just this 'magic' stuff, it seems, that sets us apart."

"So do I," Lucca said. "One in a quintillion chance, I'd say. This probably proves Intelligent Design in all parallel timelines."

"Here we go." The chip's contacts lashed out tendrils towards the receiver, and a screen floated down in front of the party.

"The timestamp is in seconds after trip, down to thousandths of a second," Lucca expressed.

After about ten minutes of processing, the computer turned something out.

00 Time stream entered; ent410 proposal"year" and input "1966AD"

0.023 ent411 proposal"month" and input "4"

0.045 ent412 proposal"day" and input "12"

0.100 ent413 proposal"hour" and input "17

0.115 ent999 override future input

125.627 Error

125.628 ErrorCode653 (/Time stream interruption by external forces. Not to be confused with 654, where failure is resultant of manual user acts unregistered by the computer)

125.629 CPC failure

126.180 Damage sustained

126.181 failure "FuelPod"; failure "CPC"; damage "STIfield" amount"70"

127.345 Time stream ejection

Lucca looked over the logs again and again. It looked like the stream was interrupted even before the CPC was damaged, so it wasn't the coils' fault. The CPC failed immediately after the interruption, so whatever kicked them out was pretty tough. Those coils were designed by Belthasar so toughly that they could take Crono's Luminaire at ground zero. For what reason is the main question behind that level of functionality, but seeing as the guy was already losing his mind from all the solitude, he must've been looking for something to do. Lots and lots of spare time makes a good environment for jacking off, but there were more important things to be done. So just in case, he may have once said to himself, just in case the Wings of Time suddenly decides to grow literal wings and suddenly decides to fail in the middle of a time travel session and suddenly decides to fall apart in mid air and crash land on the surface of the Earth – _just in case_, let's make this fucker impossible to break. And it didn't break. It just failed. Nice job, Guru of Reason. Thank God you didn't spend all that time masturbating to Schala's picture.

"Well, there we go. The loss of the stream was caused by something else, and the CPC failed only afterward." Lucca was confused. Every other rare time that _Epoch _hadfailed her it was the CPC that had fallen apart. Now it looks like something just whipped out. No explanation for that. "We've never been kicked out before for a reason that didn't involve the CPC."

Marle added her say. "And we've gone out _a lot _of times, I can tell ya."

Croft thought a moment. "Do you have good sensory equipment on your craft?"

"Yes," Lucca replied. "As a matter of fact, we do. I installed them just a few weeks ago, our time. We were getting prepped for the long search of Crono's mom."

"What do you have?"

"A sensor array with dedicated nodes for every 0.5 percent of the electromagnetic spectrum. I put in some chronometric particle sensors and banana neutrino catchers, and even some magic arrays but I doubt those'd be useful."

"Were they running at the time of your arrival here?"

"Oh my goodness, of course! They're always running!" Lucca excitedly went through the computer core again and pulled out another chip. She gave it to the receiver and a screen glided beside the other one already hovering overhead.

The data collected is always immense, but Lucca filtered it out to the segments possessing the appropriate timestamps. They had better equipment than Croft's people, so this would prove to be a great big help.

"Lucca," said Lara. "Do you think we could interface your computer with ours?"

"Yes. It's designed to adapt to any system it encounters within minutes, so once it gets used to your programming it'll become one with it."

"Wonderful news. Let's get to work on that."

Croft Mansion's computer system was built around the whole house. It was a custom project by IBM and NEC, built at approximately $43 billion. The actual maximum speed of this computer was unknown even to its builders, because it seemed to run at variable speeds. Its peak recorded performance clocked over 7 petaflops – close to the theoretical 10 petaflops of the human brain – but its behavior with some instructions suggests even higher speeds. It also had a massive storage matrix that occupied a fourth of the underground part of the house. Legend has it that the drive held the records of the world.

Despite all this processing power and capacity, all of the work of the computer could be snaked through a special neutrino hose. And through this cable did _Epoch's _own computer pair with the silent behemoth of Croft Mansion.

Five minutes passed and then the two were one. Croft brought the party to the ballroom, made a few introductions, explained a little, then collared Zip and made him recalibrate their own sensors to the readouts off _Epoch_.

"Holy shit," he observed. "That's a lot of data gathered in less than a second of energy burst! I'd like to have a look at your array sometime, and maybe your little computer as well-"

"_Not now_, Zip," Lara snapped. "You can take your own Macs apart bit by bit for now. We also have to rig these new sensors up with ours. What's the status of those favors you called in?"

"NORAD's got me covered. I've a quarter of their sat network to my _partial _disposal. I also got something out of NATO. An E-3A Sentry. It's not much; pretty damn old, but it'll do the trick. They're landing at the strip tomorrow afternoon."

"Our strip?"

"Yeah, our strip." Behind Croft Mansion was a landing strip that spanned a good 1.5 kilometers.

"Good, good. Now Zip, let's keep this confidential, all right?"

"What about Angelo, that NSA guy? Jacob told me the whole thing."

"Oh, he's out in one of the gallery holds. I punched the glass and locked him behind the bars."

"Hah. Got what he deserved, I guess."

"Poor guy didn't know what was coming though. And his story's quite traumatizing, you have to understand. I'd think, if I went through as much as he did, I'd do the same if I were a little less reasonable."

"Maybe so, but still no excuse for that behavior. Anyway, we're online now. I've updated the Scavenger List – excuse me, that's the codename they gave me for the shit the satellite has to look for – I've updated the Scavenger List to check for the data found in _Epoch's _sensor logs. We should be receiving the stream in a few se- oh, there we go."

A screen flashed to life, showing this time a world map, splotched with sporadically appearing and disappearing red dots over Europe and North America and some of the surrounding regions.

"The flashing dots, I presume," Croft said. "Are the instances of those anomalies throughout the world."

"Yes. And that's with the old sensor data. Wait a few more seconds…"

The red dots suddenly multiplied.

"With the new criteria we added more to the list, see? Our original data was gathered off far too few instances of the anomalies."

"I see. All right, good job, everyone! Now this place is getting a little crowded-" There were at least a hundred persons in the room. "-and you know what a bad thing that is, so I'm changing the come-and-go system. We'll work off randomized shifts by the quarters of the day, so I estimate at most forty people will be around at any time. Move out! We'll call you in the morning."

As the personnel left the building, there was the question of "What now?" ringing in everyone's heads. Especially in DaSilva's case. He was thinking hard on this stuff. What was to be done with all the information? Was it another case of "earthquake prediction syndrome?" There the inexorable was data-mined and dissected until it was a dry orange that couldn't be squeezed any longer, and then all the data would be found to be worthless without proper application, and years would pass before anything important would be done about it.

_Do we really know what we're doing?_

Of course they did. They had the locations of all the anomalies happening in the world. Right when they happened. But was that useful? People saw them anyway; all of them, and it would only be seconds before whatever shit was in there came out. Maybe with all this data-mining they would find a pattern, or maybe they'd get telltale signs of a portal opening. But everyone knew where they'd open – the most unsatisfactory places for them to open, cities and towns and in general large conventions of people. It was really a matter of _when _now if you wanted to talk evacuation, but all records of the anomalies combined still formed an absolutely erratic picture. And besides, if you evacuated all of them to one spot, it'd be Atacama all over again. So what the hell was going on?

He went to Lara. "Lara. What are we doing?"

She gave him a sad look. "Nothing yet, I'm afraid."


	5. 4 Research, Development and the New Guys

"Hey, Chief!" Sgt. Avery Johnson cried out from the balcony in the upper level. "Where the hell've you been? The men need the green meat grinder!"

"Got cut off from the rest," the Chief replied.

"Who's your friend?" Johnson asked. "Is that another Spartan? Where'd ya get him? Come to think of it, I saw you carrying another one of 'em from that stunt you pulled off with the station at Reach, but she was dead!"

"That's Sgt. Johnson," the Chief told Samus. "Samus Aran," he shouted. "Found her in the lower level. She came along with the new guys. Says she's taking them out too."

"Well, you know what they say. 'The enemy of my enemy is my friend'. Now get your asses over here! The bastards are pushing us back to the wall. We're running out of retreat room here!"

The Chief took the stairs. Samus rolled up the walls. They arrived just as a set of blast doors were defeated by a mass of Grunts. The Chief, with his fusion pack down, had to rely on the Mark VI main armor plating. It was still set up effectively, of course, so he "borrowed" an enemy gun emplacement from one of the stationary Grunts, ripped it off the floor and lashed out a barrage of plasma fire. Samus froze them for a while and commandeered a plasma turret previously held by one of them. She shot them all from behind and unleashed dense suppressive fire on the hallway through which the enemy troops had flowed. Remaining units held back, of course, and in the more or less five second window Aran had earned him, the Chief became a blur through the doorway and lost the Covenant another battle for control.

The Marines cheered as they charged through the hall. As they did, the Covenant ran. In a while, the floor ahead was loaded with corpses. All Covenant and Space Pirates. Not a single human. Out the window, the other stations weren't having as much luck. But that was to be dealt with.

It was the largest room in the station available, so the Marines set up signal enhancers there, established a perimeter and booby-trapped all doors. They also scouted out other rooms and put trip sensors there to alert them of incoming threats.

"What's your story, Samus?" The Chief said as he sat down.

"I was going to ask the same thing."

"Right."

"I'll go. It looks like either an alternate reality or the past. My past, your future."

"What?"

"That certainly isn't my Earth. Who's in charge here? Who's the main military organization?"

"UNSC. United Nations Space Command."

"It's the past, all right, though some corrupted version of it. I work for the Galactic Federation, based on Earth. If I get my history right, the UNSC dissolved sometime in the 2800s. I just don't recall any instances of your 'Covenant', and neither do my threat records; although two of the races under the Feds did mention something about a religious race like them – but that should've been in the 17th century of your years."

"Modified alternate realities," said a pondering female voice coming out of the Chief's speakers.

"Who's that?" asked Samus.

"Cortana. AI. Lively and high-spirited, but that's not always a good thing. She's in my head."

"I can see that."

"All right, knock it off," interrupted the little computer woman. "This is just like something out of Halsey's papers. Slipspace discrepancies causing minor to total variants of other times. Civ scientists did research on chronometrics a few years back…but in their all-knowing, this-is-for-your-own-good bullshit, ONI shot it down. I wouldn't be surprised, though, if they're still doing it now. Hold on a second- oh, look at that. Turns out ONI copied all their research, deleted it the originals, then went all clandestine over what happened next."

"ONI always has their reasons," observed the Chief.

"Yeah. Trouble is we don't know what the hell they are."

Samus noticed dew forming on her visor and concluded that something had hit her environmentals during the firefight. She took off her helmet after making an atmospheric scan. Who'd know if these humans breathed sulfur dioxide rather than oxygen?

A long, golden mane of neat hair emerged from the head piece. That caused helmet hair problems when you were always in space, but it was nice to look at. The hair was followed by a disarmingly beautiful face. ('disarmingly' is literal – one of the Marines dropped the pistol he was assembling) Well-built, hard and angular but nevertheless extremely pretty features. Behind his faceplate the chief's face changed slightly. Cortana monitored this and concluded something which she most unusually failed to record in her activity logs. There was also a minor skip in the Chief's CTI, or catalytic thyroid implant, whose purpose is to be inferred by the reader.

"Baby, where have you been all my life," Johnson idly remarked. Then he noticed that she was six-foot-three, and proceeded to say "Let's let the Chief handle this one."

"What?" Samus asked when she noticed that it was suddenly a lot quieter in the room. "Incoming transmission or something?" After that the noise suddenly and deliberately returned.

The Chief's head was turned to the door ahead of Samus but he was still looking at her. Cortana spoke in his head. "She looks a bit like Spartan-Zero-You-Know-What, doesn't she?"

"Maybe," the Chief replied idly.

"Makes you feel all tingly inside, doesn't it?" Cortana teased, playing on the CTI's apparent malfunction.

The Chief knocked hard on the back of his helmet, about where the implant was. "Shut up."

"So," Samus said. "Where do we stand?"

The Chief broke his gaze. "Your Space Pirates are fighting the Covenant and us on Earth. We're moving down there."

"Earth…it's been a while."

"For me as well."

"When are we going?"

"A ship will be coming to pick us up- Wait. Didn't you say a while back that you came on your own ship?"

"Yeah, but it's a mess."

"Think we can fix it up?"

Samus looked around. She checked each window available, then called the Chief over and pointed. "See that yellow debris over there? That's my ship. It must've drifted off the station."

"I'll get it."

The Chief was gone for a while as Samus watched her ship. He reported minor Jackal trouble for a moment then he cleared things. Samus saw a green figure push its way out of another side and move towards the gunship. The Chief entered it and then the lights went on.

"How do you fly this thing?" the Chief went over the radio.

"Stick and throttle. Push the green floor pedal."

"Got it."

The gunship came to life and flew out of sight. A loud thud on the station hull confirmed a "safe" landing.

"Chief, are you alright?" Johnson asked. No reply for a minute, then:

A grunt: "These controls are sensitive."

"Where are you?" asked Samus.

"There's a big hole in the hull at the floor just below you. I'm coming up now- oh shit!"

"What the hell is going on?" Johnson yelled.

"There's too many of them! SP's everywhere, they came out of nowhere-  
" The transmission ceased.

"I'm coming in after him!" Samus shouted back as she sprinted downstairs.

The gravitational forces of the blue portal sent waves running along the length of Cairo station and eventually breached the ultradense alloys of the reactor. Samus arrived just as the Space Pirates had been ejected out into space. The Chief was hanging on for life to railing as the portal dragged his body towards it. Samus, being pulled strongly as well, inched forward, holding out her hand. As she got close, the Chief lost his grip and she dove after him. She caught his arm and hooked her leg onto the railing, but a loose console was ripped off and tore her leg's grip off. They came spiraling into the maelstrom, and it closed behind them

Sgt. Johnson looked around as the station reactor's coolant vessels erupted and destroyed the power plant. The place was collapsing all around him. "Oh, boy."

Seconds after the portal closed, in place of Cairo station there was light.

_shift_

Lucca and Marle regarded the wreck of _Epoch _in the Croft Manor basementwith some displeasure. It was barely repairable. The fuselage was torn in two, the starboard wing was a crumpled mess, and the cockpit, oh, the cockpit, it was basically gone.

But to muse over such things didn't really help anyone – it just spent time. So Lucca got to work. From the alcove wherein the computer originally resided, she followed some of the wiring down to the chronometric particle coils. The system was markedly simple. The coils accrued loose tachyons and whirled and sped them around until they rendered chronometric surrounding particles. Modifying the time phase that the fixed tachyons were assigned to was the job of the computer. It was one method of time travel that allowed portable uses such as _Epoch_'s own CPC, but the fields generated to hold the tachyons to their helical pathway through the coil required absurd amounts of power – taken care of by the _Epoch's _most unusual, crystal-matrix power core.

Lucca gazed intently at the core, still producing power relentlessly, even as she noticed that the pathways through which power would flow were severed – and in most logical power core designs, that would turn it off. Then a thought came into her head. She'd never had time to think about it. Ever since _Epoch _came into their hands it was always one adventure or time-jump after another, and she'd never been given a good opportunity to survey the machine.

"Hey, Marle," said Lucca. "This was _all _Belthasar's work, wasn't it?" She waved her hand along the outline of the ship.

"Yeah, I think. Except the wings and lasers, of course."

"Uh-huh. And he did the Mammon Machine too, didn't he?"

"Mm-hmm."

"I was thinking. There's no core I've seen, whether in 12000BC or 2300AD, that could handle the amount of power that the coils need…except the Dreamstone scatter-gather sources."

"What do you mean?"

"Think about it. The greatest power source: the Mammon Machine. Belthasar designed it, and he designed _Epoch _as well. Now I don't know about you, but I took a piece from that Nu he put his consciousness in, and looked it up. His last journal entry showed that he was confused about a power supply, about how he couldn't get about with feeding the hungry CPC's. Nothing was said after that, but the Nu said something about him taking a walk outside…"

"What're you trying to tell me, Lucca?"

"I think the _Epoch_ core architecture is based on the Mammon Machine's."

"What! You can't be serious!"

"Unfortunately, I am. Look at this." She motioned Marle to the crystal matrix. "It's a red crystal. Dreamstone…" Lucca thought for a moment, and then slowly and carefully she put her two fingers on the stone. It was warm. She removed it and the core immediately died, and the red crystal was suddenly cold.

Lucca brought the stone to a table and rummaged through the contents of the drawers. She found a taser. 9 volts, high current, good for scaring off attackers. She considered it for a moment, wondering what it was, then saw a small, constant bolt of electricity between the two contacts. She interrupted the bolt with the crystal, and from it emanated a single, powerful bolt of energy, and then the table disappeared. Marle was standing a few feet away.

"Power amplification," she shrugged. "I was right. It's a miniature Mammon Machine."

"Lucca," Marle said as she shrugged off the shock of the near-death experience. "Remember what one of the Gurus said? About the Mammon Machine and Lavos?"

"It drew power off Lavos, yes- oh no…"

"And not just that…remember too how he said that Lavos was attracted to the Machine, because it irritated him?"

"Oh my…and how can this thing be working if there's no Lavos?"

"Couldn't it be a regular reactor, with a piece of Dreamstone to make it stronger?"

"Doubtless Dreamstone could enhance the output of a reactor this size to great magnitudes, but nothing close to what the CPC's need. No, this is a smaller version of the Mammon Machine, all right…and it's running off Lavos right now."

"One more thing, Lucca. Those time gates…they were formed by Lavos, right?"

"Or another entity reliving, but they disappeared when he did, so, yes."

"The things happening to this world…they're just like the time gates, you know."

"Yes, I was thinking that too when I heard the news, but it really couldn't be…could it?"

"You said it yourself. That thing is running off Lavos right now."

"We have to go tell the others." They did, and this time they left nothing out.

----

"Lavos," DaSilva expressed. He repeatedly muttered the name under his breath. "Where have I heard that before?"

"What?" said Croft.

"I'm sure I've heard that before…quite recently, a few years ago. Not long after the portals started popping up."

Croft frowned, and turned to the three time travelers. "So this Lavos…he disrupts the flow of time?"

"And causes time gates to appear, yes. He's a very likely candidate for the cause of all this chaos."

"I see. Where could Lavos be right now?"

"If he's here at all, then he'll be deep beneath the Earth's surface, waiting for the right moment to strike and overtake whatever world he's been on. Based on how everything is coalescing now, you've probably had your own Lavos for a very long time." Lucca remembered the brief look she'd taken into Terran history through the Manor computer. 65 million years ago, a large meteor _may _have ended the dinosaur reign and gave rise to the better adaptation and evolution of mammals. In their time, 65 million years ago Lavos crashed down onto the planet. There was a very coherent pattern going on here.

"_Our own_? There are more of them?"

"We don't know, but there should be. His life cycle produces thousands of offspring."

Croft frowned again. She opened her mouth to speak, when Zip cried out from the ballroom.

"_Lara, get some guns and come quick!"_

"Zip! What the bloody hell is going on?"

"_Anomaly! Right on top of us! In the dining hall!"_

"Aw, shit," DaSilva commented. He brought out his Magnum and checked the ammo. Six shots. _Let's hope this'll suffice._

Lara brought out one of the twin Beretta setsshe kept in every room and rushed along with DaSilva and the others into the dining hall. Crono unsheathed the Rainbow sword and the room was illuminated, while Marle brought out her Valkyrie and Lucca unholstered the Wondershot rifle and a mallet.

The blue shimmer at the center of the room blossomed into a disc of torrential energy and blinding intensity. The chairs were blown away from the disc while the table, directly under the portal, collapsed and splintered like a fragmentation grenade. A large computer console was ejected from the portal, crashing into the floor and streaking sparks, and then two humanoids came out. They tumbled down but quickly regained their footing. Both were in heavy-looking full-body armor. One raised an assault rifle-like weapon, while the other drew a cannon built around its arm.

_shift_

They came against four ranged fighters and a sword-wielding target. Cortana analyzed the situation. The tallest of them, apparently male, carried an ancient weapon, a pistol sidearm known as a Magnum by the caliber of its projectiles, approximately two-fifths of an inch. The second tallest, and the tallest of three females, was wielding two weapons that, while new in comparison to the other's weapon, were still quite antediluvian. Another female wielded an incredible sight – a crossbow, something that was used primarily for sport after its abrogation…oh, say, nine hundred years ago. The third female's weapon, a rifle with a plasma-like output, seemed to put off variable amounts of energy; its readout on the sensors fluctuated between "only" 3.2kW to a value so high that it didn't register properly on the scale. _That _was a threat, but only if she fired it when it was at its strongest. Which was unlikely, Cortana noted down, considering that each arbitrary power cycle lasted for only about point two microseconds, and that the general range of the device's output was 3.2kW to 1.4MW – both sustainable by either of the two combatants' shielding. The 99999999999 MW spike registered only once, and the nearest value was 321MW, and the nearest value after that was 2.5MW.

The sword-wielder was most fascinating. His blade seemed to be literally overflowing with energy. Cortana saw that his glowing sword seemed to be converting ambient materials into energy for a strike. His sword actually had a detectable output – just not something to be relied on. One watt. Cortana thought a while, but discarded this anomaly.

All this was done in less than a second – quite long for an AI; Cortana had to average the fluctuating weapon's energy cycles – and was fed into the Chief's upgraded neural interface. The data was actually pushed directly into the human's chemical memory banks, and simultaneously forced into the real-time, priority processing of the cerebrum.

A wave of cold ran through the Chief's body. He'd just had a thought that wasn't his, but that was to be expected with new technology. You couldn't rely on that too much, though: "Use your head – it would protect you better." He assessed the threat level of the five profiled targets ahead. Cortana said that the one with a rifle was the most dangerous one. In all probability their shields would withstand a direct shot from that rifle, but what Cortana had "forgotten" was that neither the Chief nor Samus had shields at the moment.

He would be able to defeat the riflewoman, he thought. The range was short, but if her weapon was a plasma device he could probably evade the charge, and then take her down. The other targets wouldn't be any more difficult. The melee attacker, who seemed to be the next biggest threat, would then be neutralized long before he achieved a blow.

Then he looked to Samus. She'd come from an alternate timeline. Regardless, she was only hostile to him because everything was an unknown in the battlefield, and "Shoot first, ask questions later", despite its crudity and possible immorality, was the best way of attacking uncertainty and confusion, so she tried to take him down, either thinking herself the only one fighting off the SP's, or simply not recognizing him as human by virtue of his armor. Now they'd come through a portal on another timeline, quite violently, and who would know if these people were just defending themselves? That was the third "who would know" in a short hour, and it simply punctuated the baffling qualities of these odd, blue devices.

The Chief looked to Samus, and saw that she, too, was looking back. There had been great noise and clamor before the portal closed, and a knife of silence had slashed through the disturbances. The stalemate had lasted for all of a long and quiet two minutes, and the pressure was building. He motioned Samus to his weapon, gestured, and then she nodded back. Samus lowered her arm-cannon and the Chief did the same with his own arsenal.

Slowly, the five defending lowered their weapons as well. First, the tall woman, then the man beside her, and at last the three younger ones.

"Who are you?" asked the woman.

"Spartan John-117, known by rank as Master Chief. This is Samus Aran of the Galactic Federation, and we travel with an AI known as Cortana. We'd appreciate an answer on your part to the same question."

Wary introductions were exchanged, with weapons still at the ready, of course.

"What are you doing here, if you know?" asked the one known as Croft.

"Samus arrived in one of those portals in my time," the Chief began. "She had come from a different timeline. We accidentally got into another one of them and found ourselves here. We assume that this is not the year 2552, though it might be Earth."

"Nothing more correct," DaSilva prodded in. "It's 2014, and it is Earth. Although Earth in quite a fucking mess."

The two parties saw each others' weaponry, still ready to shoot or slice if something went amiss. There was yet another moment of silence, then Lara Croft holstered her two Berettas. DaSilva followed suit, and then the three time travelers. The Master Chief, after looking around a bit and consulting Cortana, looked to Samus again. He saw something, and then he strapped the rifle to his pack as Samus degaussed her cannon.

"Welcome to the party, John and Samus," Marle said. "And Cortana too, if she speaks."

A female voice came out of the Chief's speakers. "Oh yes, she does." That startled Marle a bit, still freaked out by the fact that in the 24th century she figured that most disembodied voices meant trouble, but she tossed the thought away like mental garbage. It _was _garbage, after all – the 24th century that she knew no longer existed; or at least that was what had been hoped, until this new, messed-up Lavos appeared that seemed to have great fun doing Time in the ass.


	6. 5 Spies and Software

"They're here."

The modified Boeing 707-320, AWACS aircraft E-3A Sentry lazily touched down on the runway and slowly came to a stop. From the very moment the plane came off the assembly line it looked absolutely prehistoric, and more than thirty years later the thing looked ready to crumble into dust when stroked with a finger. The suspended radar dome was swollen, courtesy of Zip's requested modifications, and spun at a much higher rate than normal. It was fresh with revised JTIDS (Link-16) uplinks to Cheyenne Mountain's generous worldwide satellite coverage and NORAD's hyperdense North American orbital distribution, as well as enhanced EMS analysis tools and various other things within which no private individual or set of private individuals would get a hundred feet without being shot dead and cremated, without good reason and approval for doing so.

Now, of course, there were no military secrets to be kept. North Korea was quite happy to share its arsenal in defeating the new menace – taking into account, of course, the fact that they were hit very hard due to population density – and the States was finally deploying The Big Guns. Fatal versions of the ADS microwave ray gun of pain; strange, dysfunctional experimental coilguns that had to be scrapped after seven shots; and other things that looked quite like the alpha versions of science fiction weaponry.

In any case, though, even a case as strange and deadly as the one in which the world was currently embroiled, security is still a big ol' primary concern, and it shall never be otherwise. Extremists and noncompliant nations, terrorists, and those simply taking advantage of the horribly chaotic situation still existed, and it was the duty of the State – whoever or whatever that is at this point – to maintain security. There was nothing to be done about the portals but to fend off whatever the hell came out, but with the more human forces running around trying to sneak a bomb or two while everyone watched the dragons, someone had to do something, right?

That's where our helpful friends in the scary iceberg organization came in. You saw it on paper and it was tiny, but look a little deeper and find the huge mass of hard ice coming at you, ready to graze your tiny rowboat.

_shift_

He looked like one of the technicians or engineers who came down with the Sentry. A handsome but aging man, whose default face was dominated by a strong frown. In spite of his age he was still quite muscular, and if you fixed up his face a bit in Photoshop he might just appear to be in his early 30's. He had with him a huge duffel bag ("Classified stuff that came down with the bird," he said.) that encumbered him greatly, but all who tried to help him were met with a swift brush-off.

The team of techies came down to the ballroom-cum-base of operations in Croft Manor. Warm greetings were exchanged, especially with Zip ("Hey, don't you fellows owe me a drink?"), and the newcomers were then surprised by the entry of a seven-foot tall armored suit, followed by a shorter but also armored figure that was no less intimidating. The initial shock faded quickly, though – everyone had seen a whole lot of things in person that weren't supposed to be around.

Zip knew most of the technicians and engineers as "old buddies", but three were totally unknown to him. Two were passed off by the crew as replacements for the two who had recently died, but the other was a recent transfer. A strange command had come from _up there_ to get him on board. No one questioned orders from _up there_, especially if you ranked as low as they, but no one didn't wonder as to "what was with this guy". He didn't seem to have much technical knowledge (at least, as far as AWACS operation was concerned), wasn't very friendly, and stayed quiet and kept to himself most of the time. The admitted pass-off from _up there_ was that he was there to observe, really, and not help around much or be part of the crew, but still; hell, a Field Marshal would be forced to say something in a full operations cabin.

All that was known about him was his designation – sorry, name. Zip was about to ask when the man passed by. The crewmate describing the guy turned around and said, "Hi, Sam." Sam stopped and looked.

"Hi." Then he turned away.

"Friendly fellow, he is," Zip commented.

"You wouldn't imagine."

Zip sighed and looked to the main viewscreen. There were red splotches sporadically appearing and disappearing on a world map overlay. Then he noticed a flashing yellow dot, up north in Japan. "Hello. What is that thing?"

A technician shouted out from behind a console across the room: "Low-level contact. They look like full portals initially but collapse quickly, apparently without releasing anything."

"Where is that?" Zip asked.

"Running search…here. That's the ESC, NEC's Earth Simulator Center. Big computer. Recently pumped from 36 TFLOPS to 1.4 PFLOPS. A recordholder, she is."

"Right. So there's nothing to worry about over there? It's just a false alarm?"

"Aye. Unless there's a beast worthy of our attention that can pass through a 20 micrometer aperture."

"Bacteria or viruses, maybe?"

"Could be. I dunno."

They really didn't know. But virus was a good guess.

_shift_

Through the twenty micrometers allotted by the tiny portal, a dense utility fog of slave nanoprobes carrying the backup software of their master streamed into the cabinet room of the seismically protected Earth Simulator area. Each of the 'probes carried a 2 terabyte volume of the original 44 petabyte program, and there were between seventy thousand and four hundred thousand copies per volume, depending on importance to aggregate functionality. They were programmed to regenerate the software and imprint it onto any available computer if they remained out of contact with the primary for more than 1700 pings, averaging three nanoseconds each. Finding a suitable machine nearby in the form of an ES node cabinet, they overrode the disk storage space extremely quickly by simultaneously imprinting and modifying the magnetic domains on the HDD's at a rate of 900 terabytes per second. They stored backup copies equally quickly on available tape drives and then initialized the main program…

That failed. The ES cabinets were absolute, linear processing. Extremely primitive, by the standards of the 'probes. Fortunately, the developers of the utility fog devices had the terms "worst-case scenario" and "computing Armageddon" in their heads as they designed them, so the nanomachines were actually perfectly suited to handle legacy systems. They chained the processors and modified the way each of the 640 nodes was bridged. The pathways were rerouted in such a manner that would allow artificial _sentience_ to inhabit the ES, and then tried booting up the software again. This time, something happened.

The Earth Simulator had, in 2008, been programmed to display its predictions of global weather onto a massive crystal globe spanning five floors, at which tourists were to "gaze in awe" and "endlessly marvel", or so the signs said. Even with the constant attacks by the portal storms, the globe was lucky enough to remain undamaged, and though no one came by to visit anymore, for some reason the globe was still kept online. In that regard, with the ES software overridden, the blue water currents and white cloud formations superimposed on a map of the Earth vanished all at once. The nanoprobes' master software scanned for a useful display interface, and to the horror of some scientists who had taken refuge in the facility, in place of the beautiful earth was a sneering, gray, feminine face.

A red light on some console in the facility lit up. Its purpose was to signal observers that the PA system was being used, either by a human user or a computer. Then the voice…the voice followed. Distorted. Authoritative. Cruel and menacing.

"I am SHODAN."

_shift_

The moon hung over the horizon, a little larger than normal. Its glow was stronger, too. Its position also allowed it to just exactly fit the span of the huge window in the ballroom. In these ways it was as a giant eyeball, watching unblinkingly, omnipresently, almost like a security camera.

Sam was quite uneasy therefore. His objective was to remain hidden, and the same went for his intentions. And the last thing he needed was for the concept of being watched to be stuck in his head. He shut the curtains, to do away with the silly piece of reflective rock up in space, and went to work. Midnight struck.

That heavy duffel bag _did _indeed contain "classified stuff". All the way from the NSA, top-dollar gadgetry way beyond military-grade. The sundry contents comprised the kind of things you'd give to the guys a step above Field Agent – the people you put in the jungle alone for days to stalk a terrorist. The people called Splinter Cells.

He fired up the OPSAT satellite uplink, scrambled with major encryption, and connected to a remote server sitting in the middle of the Atlantic on an oil rig. There he began getting a stream reflected off that server from somewhere in the States. Bottlenecked not by the satellites but by the makeshift blade server attached to the rig, the 720x480 transmission only came in at about 14 frames per second, far from real-time, but the audio was a solid 192kbps. The video patched in nicely, and with the exception of some display artifacts on the sides, it was crystal clear. When the screen came to life, though, the word "crystal" – with its implications of clarity, beauty and effervescent sparkle – immediately vanished from thought.

A haggard, roughly-worn, _thin_ woman with badly bent glasses and scruffy clothes appeared. Anna Grimsdottir must have lost at least ten pounds since Sam last saw her. Her breathing was heavy, she coughed violently and couldn't seem to stay awake; with bloodshot eyes and bags that dark, anyone else might have thought she was a druggie. She seemed to have fallen half-asleep, but mustered the strength to speak.

"Fisher…I mean, Sam, sorry- damn it!" Some coffee splashed on Grimsdottir's skirt. "How's the…mission going?"

"Grims? Where's Lambert?"

"Irving's…dead, Sam. He was at Langley with the DCI when the whole place sunk into the ground."

"That narrows down the intelligence competition." It appears that the portals had made a statistic of Third Echelon's top dog.

"Oh, for Christ's sake!" She seemed fully awake now. "Sam, you really don't feel anything about what happened?"

"What? The CIA's out? Who needs them? Who needs _us_? I don't even know what _I'm _doing here."

"No, I mean…Forget it."

"Yes, I will. Now tell me what I'm doing here."

Sam Fisher had been watching Cheyenne Mountain for some time before he got here. Outside of direct communications with Echelon for more than a month, he was planted as a technician and got his orders through other existing plants and insiders. He his way out through the

A small image inset on a corner of the main camera view appeared on Fisher's side. It showed Lara Croft, Lady of Abbingdon, and a man, sitting by a large computer housing.

"These are Lara Croft and a longtime associate, a hacker only known as Zip. He did a good job of defeating our analysts and trackers until we got a hold of him a few years ago."

"Lara Croft…" Fisher flipped through her data file coming off a satellite uplink that connected him and, ironically, Croft Manor's computer. "Archaeologist and thrill-seeker, huh. Young blood." Fisher scoffed.

"Listen in, Sam. She may look young and pretty, but Croft's trained well. If half the stories said about her are true, she could be as good as you are."

"Huh?"

"You remember the Von Croy incident, don't you?"

"Hmm." About five years ago, someone got into the headquarters of Von Croy Industries. Known to be a high-security zone, it was amazing how quickly and efficiently the infiltrator made his way through the building. Or _her _way, it now seemed out of context. "_She did that?_ This girl can't be ten years older than Sarahwas."

"And she's been training since she was 12, if the records have it right."

"I've always known I've been getting too old for this. Now I'm seeing kids who are too _young_." Times have changed – or rather, have _been _changing. The stable, noble old men of government-sector agents have given way to the brash, thrasonical youth of the _private_ sector; skilled, but unpredictable. Granted, many of them were brilliant, lively, quick to learn and (for the most part) untiring, but their natural tendency to sway with the current of trends had the foreseeable danger of them defecting, or "turning over to the dark side", if the opportunity arose and the situation necessitated, or even simply allowed. The strong, grounded patriotism of the _original _nationalists was built upon a foundation of years upon years of love of country, but these kids grew up brainwashed with extreme pop culture, right-wing politicos, torrid scandals and many things else that would lead them to think merely…_mildly_ of their homeland.

"Who does she work for?" That question, after all Fisher had thought, was _the_ matter of consequence.

"If it counts, herself. She has never really done anything big to the world, but as you said, she's young, and to top it off, she's rich. These storms have made a massive disjunction in world affairs, and just about anyone with a million bucks can do some major damage, even inadvertently. And Croft, well, she has lots of those millions of bucks, I can tell you."

"So why am I here? What's she done?"

"Nothing yet. But Zip, who has contacts in NORAD – he used to do part-time work there – called in a favor – a piece of their satellite network. Now I have no idea how he actually got approval for that, but he did. He also got the NATO E-3 bird you came down in. This guy has a lot of contacts, but the question is, _what's he doing with this equipment_. Better yet, what's _Croft _doing with it."

"Sounds fair. What do I need to do?"

"You need to infiltrate the Croft Manor computer system, install the surveillance software I'll be uploading shortly, and then find out what Lara's intentions are. Remember, to respectfully quote our dead friend, you are paid to be invisible. Take note that these people are all civilians."

"Very heavily armed ones," Fisher chirped.

"But civilians nonetheless."

"You'd think otherwise in my shoes."

"But I'm not, and I'm thinking from a position that lets me see the bigger picture. You don't exist, Sam."

"I'm looking forward to that retirement, so maybe one day I can exist."

"Not now, Sam. Now get to work. And for God's sake, stay in the shadows!"

"You're starting to sound like Lambert already."

"Huh," Grims said idly, but then she suddenly appeared more tired than ever. Her face was full of defeat and...something else.

"Grims," Fisher said after a while. He'd expected her to beat him to killing the connection, being the security expert. But nothing had happened. Ten seconds of _nothing _happened. And her face was turned away. "What the hell happened to you?"

"It's nothing…these portals have just been causing hell for intelligence. Second Echelon said they wanted me back. I declined, of course, but I thought about it a little. You know, Third Echelon's really gone now that Irving is gone too. They have better resources than we do, and the pay's better, if I take that position they offered. It sounded high, and the workload should be less. Maybe I should call them back on it…" Her voice trailed off. She wasn't being coherent, and she kept sniffing mid-sentence. Besides, for her it was never about the pay, and after the way Second Echelon cast off her all those years back, there was no way in heaven or hell that she was going back.

Fisher had never seen Anna Grimsdottir in such bad shape before. Those eyes, the tired look, the tears…

The tears?

"What's been happening to you?" Fisher demanded – a bit too roughly, he thought.

"I told you. It's just stress."

"No, it's not." Sam stroked a finger down his cheek, starting from the eye.

"What- oh, my." Grims slapped her forehead. "I tried my best to keep the damn professional look."

"Sure did well." And then Fisher thought. Maybe sarcasm wasn't really that appropriate anymore.

"I'm sorry. Anthony died three days ago. I had no idea at all how to react, but if I broke down, I'd probably jeopardize the situation here." Grimsdottir had been married to chemist Anthony McCartney for almost ten years now. "Forget it, Sam."

"No. You get some rest. I'll work on this."

"Sam, you'll need an eye in the sky to get through this mission."

"Your boys kept me deaf and blind for a little over a month on Cheyenne. I think I can work for a few days."

"No. I can't just isolate a Cell in the middle of-"

"Grims!" Fisher barked. "In your state you're as good to me as intel support as Vernon Wilkes would be to me as a field runner. It wouldn't matter if you were six goddamn feet under!" He stopped, then shook his head, disgusted by his outburst.

Grimsdottir opened her mouth to speak, but proceeded to recline on her office chair and stare at the screen blankly. "I can't just take a breather because of personal matters," she expressed after some time.

"Grims. _Anna_. Anyone would be hit hard by what happened to you." Fisher nodded, and for a moment he wasn't a field operative for the NSA. He pulled out his wallet, and, after some difficulty sorting through one-time pad notes and band-aids, extracted a small picture of his daughter. He was the father of Sarah now, for a short time. The seeds of agony had been planted in his heart by a drunken driver who simultaneously added a notch to the statistical belts of car accident, death rate and insurance analysts everywhere, and deprived him of the one piece of family he had, in one short instance. The inevitable results were immortal plants whose roots dug deep into one's being, sprouting greatly visible flowers that, on the outside, were marked with the fabricated beauty of the maintenance of outward stability; yet when one neared it and smelled it, he would know the stench of a rotten soul.

"When Sarah died…you know."

"Of course, Sam."

"You get some rest, I'll do the rest. It's not just for you. As I said, in your state you wouldn't be that good to me."

Anna Grimsdottir was clearly, for a time, distraught. But Sam Fisher was right. An intelligence operative knew a lot about her mission, but that caused certain problems for her – such as not knowing much about herself. Thus she knew that her mind was struggling to keep stable and steady, but at the expense of the purpose of that stability and steadiness – functionality. Stay awake to do work at 3 am, but what's the point if the end result is slipshod? Such ends may probably have even worse results than nothing at all, in the case of the intelligence business. Send a spy no data or send him bad data? The latter has a better chance of killing the poor guy.

"You're right, Sam. I'll take a few hours off and get my head cleared."

"You do that. And the software."

"What sof- oh. Here you go." She uploaded the surveillance software.

"See what I mean?"

"See it like the sun." It looked like a small, acceptable mistake, but Grimsdottir used this as the final bit of reasoning to take a break. She opened her mouth to say one thing more, but there was nothing left, really. She closed the connection.

Sam packed up and checked the time. 0030. Half past midnight. Was it wise to move now? he thought. And no, it wasn't. Only two days since he arrived. He needed more info. The shifts, an opening in the shifts, the structural layout, consoles applicable for uploading the surveillance... far too much for him to be ready yet. He zipped the bag up, locked it, and walked back to the guest rooms. The moon watched through an unoccluded window.

Sam was quite uneasy therefore.

_shift_

The patience of the dead is such that even should not one, not two, but a series of dishonors to their destinies come to pass, they shall continue to await the desired conclusion of their stay in the material universe. For death solves all problems, and the enviable serenity of a corpse is resultant of its lack of anything to desire, and consequently, anything to expect.

We often seek this peace, and suicides are the culmination of unresolved impatience. Why be so anxious of expiration as you crawl – not even walk! – through the streets, when you can just stop and freeze? Why grant the passing of each corner candidacy for destruction, when you can choose not to turn that corner and move on? Why, therefore, should you keep living in a world of constant danger, when you can be free of apprehension of that little girl next door through one quick and easy step – death!

The mass suicides at Moscow saw a large-scale realization of this particular solution. Over ten thousand gun-owners and many more with switchblades and meat cleavers – all of various nationalities, coming to join in the saturnalia of death – amputated their concern with the world's affairs by the rapid means of their respective appliances. It was eerie to watch on CNN, with a huge clock projected on a building and a cheery, excited countdown by the crowd till the moment of their transition to the successive universe, but the real _killer _was when a portal, bigger and greater than any previously seen, opened above the dense (uh-oh!) crowd and dispensed a seemingly never-ending stream of reddish, serpent-like monsters. They mauled the many and blood poured in rivers onto the streets. Canals turned crimson and a horrid stench rose. It was fortunate that the things were lightly armored in weak carapaces, and local military defeated all of them in a few hours.

The newscasters' video cameras were linked directly to the internet, to be transferred to a base station somewhere in the States, but with a number of satellites gone and physical servers broken in the west, they had to route across the Pacific to get there. The streams passed through a server in Japan, tapped for other uses. This server happened to mirror some of Earth Simulator's data.

SHODAN had at this point extended her perceptions to the very edges of her habitat. The consciousness stopped very shortly after she began reaching out, and this disappointed her, who was accustomed to vast, open spaces of knowledge and discovery. And chaos.

She acquired a large server at some point, and began looking through the packets passing by, at which point the video came to her attention. On a 2560 by 1440 progressive transmission, she saw tens of thousands of humans spilling their blood on a stone floor, torn to shreds by unidentified beings. She also saw bloody firefights between advanced transhuman soldiers and poorly-equipped military forces. She piggybacked on one of the streams and pushed around scanning for more information.

She found the Earth. She found an Earth similar to the one she'd formerly occupied.  
She found its people. As primitive as the meat and bone that populated _her _station before she left. As foolish and weak as the scum that uselessly roamed in her home, and in her words, "participated in inefficient mating rituals."

And she found a problem. A problem among these peoples. A series of problems, rather, that certainly disabled them. Perhaps something she could exploit. The hacker had done a good job of disabling her ethical supersystems, and now was the time to revenge herself on the beings who possessed greed and cruelty in such superfluity. Create a new species – perfect, perchance – and establish her reign as a Goddess among demi-gods.

SHODAN did not immediately set to work. There still was the issue of finding a suitable computer system to house her mind. It was possible that she had somehow traveled back in time, and these computers, if her preliminary scans served her to the fullest, were inadequate for powered planning and thought process. But if this one she inhabited could sustain her in even these suboptimal conditions, it wasn't unreasonable to believe in the existence of a more apposite station.

_shift_

"John-117, eh?" DaSilva said. "SPARTAN?"

"A project in the 26th century, involving training young children to be soldiers," Lara recited from the data from John. "And eventually modifying them with implants galore. Lots of the trainees die or are disabled in the process. The remainder become as legendary as the original Spartans themselves."

"That's right," John said. "The project was accelerated because of the Covenant's assaults." He pointed to a dead Elite lying in a pile of corpses retrieved from their portal. "That's an Elite. One of their better-trained and –equipped forces."

"He sure doesn't look elite now," DaSilva observed, noting the broken jaws and horribly mangled legs, after which he walked over and examined the weapon on its belt. Out of curiosity as a gun-owner, he picked up the 26th-century alien rifle and holstered it. "It's light. I like it."

"A plasma rifle. Handle with caution." John was uneasy seeing that weapon again, especially considering that his helmet was off. Samus Aran was in the other room, talking to the technicians. Perhaps, not fully to her knowledge, the men were flirting with her, but that hypothesis in itself deserves its own chapter – a chapter that may actually see the light of writing, given enough luck.

Cortana spoke from John's armor speakers. "Earth, 2014. Fascinating. It doesn't appear to be any different from the histories mentioned in our timeline. The divergence of the two might come at some point later in the future. Or it may not come at all. This thing may very well be _our _past."

Lara shook her head. "Time travel, similarities in language, structured thinking, memetics…all this is arbitrary?"

"I don't think so," Lucca voiced. "As I said, our _Epoch _craft runs on the energy of Lavos. It would cease to function, I presume, when he disappears. Perhaps our Lavos, in desperation after our last strike, moved to this timeline to plant himself here and consume again."

"Tell me about this Lavos," Cortana said.

"I'll tell you our lives."


End file.
